I’m really glad that Avery found his “prepper’s paradise.” It looks beautiful- and full of resources- out there in the Northwest.

On Christmas Day, I also came across an article about active military preppers on the UPI website. From the Deep South:

We evidently dodged the Mayan end-of-the-world bullet, but so-called preppers in the United States say they’ll stay prepared nonetheless.

Navy Times reported last week people such as Gunnery Sgt. David Williams of Gulfport, Miss., who are part of the preppers movement — people who say they intend to be prepared for whatever calamities befall us — don’t care if you think they’re crazy. They just take comfort in their stockpiles of food, water, weapons and other vital supplies.

“A lot of the guys in my unit think I’m crazy. I’ll push the zombie apocalypse and the whole 2012 end-of-the-world business. I don’t really believe any of that crap, but it makes it fun,” Williams, a member of a Navy Seabee construction unit who has served in Afghanistan, told the newspaper. “When you’re planning for the zombie apocalypse, you’re still planning.

“Survival really is a community effort. If you’re just one dude or one family living in a bunker, what are you living for? What’s the point? What are [you] trying to stick around for? You might as well go out with everybody else because there isn’t going to be anything when you climb out of your hole.”

Williams — who has served as an instructor at the Marine Corps’ Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Calif., and has been a survival, evasion, resistance and escape instructor — has written the Survivology 101 blog for the past three years.

“If we all die together, we all die together,” Williams said. “But if we make it through, we become a strong community and we rebuild. It may not be the diehard survival mentality, but there has to be something to live for, too. You have to have something more than yourself; otherwise, you’re a sociopath and probably don’t need to be living anyway.”

Like with a lot of things in life, preppers seem to come in all shapes and sizes.

From My Other Blog

Back on New Year’s Eve, I blogged about Swiss-born investment advisor/money manager Marc Faber appearing on Bloomberg Television’s In the Loop. The publisher of the monthly investment newsletter The Gloom Boom & Doom Report talked about precious metals (among other financial topics) and shared the following with viewers: I tell you, I prefer physical precious […] ...

Well-known investor, author, and financial commentator Jim Rogers was recently interviewed by Geoff Rutherford for Sprott Money News as part of their “Ask The Expert” series. The Singapore-based Rogers talked about a number of financial/investing topics, including what he believed are the safest countries to keep money and assets in. From their exchange recorded March […] ...

Regular readers of Offshore Safe Deposit Boxes might remember me mentioning IBV International Vaults last summer. I named the South African private vault as having the “World’s Best Offshore Private Vault Video.” (Editor’s note: I’ve encountered some really good videos lately for the second installment of this “competition,” which is scheduled to be held again […] ...

Just like St. James’ Safe Deposit in Leeds, England, there’s been another non-bank, private vault I’ve followed for some time that’s now opened its doors. Enter RockSafe, located in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah in Malaysia. From the Daily Express (Malaysia) on March 15: Another safe deposit service has debuted with Rocksafe Sdn […] ...